The Guardian | How Nelly Furtado's Loose created a blueprint for modern pop

Made with Timbaland, her gloriously eclectic album still sounds like stapled-together heterogenous perfection, and remains relevant a decade after release

The joy of Loose is the enthusiasm with which the collaborators are willing to both play with and shuck off their supposed genre conventions. Furtado embraces the preposterous bigger-than-life gold digger thump of Maneater; Timbaland co-produces with Chris Martin of Coldplay to create the heart-on-sleeve broken-hearted psychedelia of All Good Things (Come to an End), complete with washes of surging ecstasy and dead-on Beatles nod. Timbaland and Furtado will flirt with anything – which put them squarely in a long line of flirters, from Sam Cooke channeling Dylan to Michael Jackson kissing rock guitarto Beyoncé playing with country. Furtado and Timbaland’s collaboration is worth revisiting 10 years on, not because it opened up pop radio or charted a new course, but because its sprawling willingness to go every which way encapsulates its pop moment, which is our pop moment, too. Looseis a celebration of the inspired looseness of pop, or R&B, or hip hop, or rock, or whatever you want to call this promiscuous music we’re listening to.